It is said that, in 1941 the Ford motor company produced an experimental automobile with a plastic body composed of 70% cellulose fibers from hemp. The car body could absorb blows 10 times as great as steel without denting. The car was designed to run on hemp fuel. Because of the ban on both hemp and alcohol, the car was never mass produced.

There are more than 16,400 parking meters in Manhattan, New York.

New York cabs get about 2000 tickets per month, handed out by about 2000 traffic attendants.

Manhattan traffic crawls at an average of 6.2 miles an hour on midtown city streets.

A gallon of gasoline produces 8.8 kg of CO2.

The first Ford cars had Dodge engines.

About a quarter of the world still drives on the left, and the countries that do are mostly old British colonies.

The Boeing Evergreen 747 Supertanker is the world’s largest waterbomber.

The pilot with the most flying hours is American John Edward Long. From May 1933 to April 1977 he flew 62 654 hours, achieving a total of more than 7 years airborne.

There are about a billion bicycles in the world, twice as many as motorcars.

In 1955, the Ford Thunderbird outsold the Chev Corvette 24 to one.

The fewest airplane passengers killed in one year was 1 in 1993 and the most was 583 in 1977 when two Boeing 747s collided on the runway at Los Rodeos airport, Tenerife, the Canary Islands.

The first auto race in the United States, in Chicago in 1895, was won by J. Frank Duryea at an average speed of 7.5mph (12 km/h).

Henry Ford started operations of his first successful car in Detroit in 1896.

The usual thermal efficiency of reciprocal steam engine is 15%. That of steam turbine is over 40%.

Nuclear ships are basically steamships and driven by steam turbines. The reactor just develops heat to boil the water.

The world’s oldest surviving boat is a simple 10 feet( 3 metre) long dugout dated to 7400 BC. It was discovered in Pesse Holland in the Netherlands.

Four out of five boat sinkings occur at their mooring.

Rock drawings from the Red Sea site of Wadi Hammamat, dated to around 4000 BC show that Egyptian boats were made from papyrus and reeds.

The world’s earliest known plank-built ship, made from cedar and sycamore wood and dated to 2600 BC, was discovered next to the Great Pyramid in 1952.